How Your Pets Can Go Green
Adopt from a shelter
Why buy when you can adopt one of the 70,000 puppies and kittens born every day in the United States? Love knows no pedigree. Check out Petfinder.com to find your perfect match.
Spay or neuter your pet
Did we mention 70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day in the United States? We don't need any more homeless animals than we already have. As a bonus, spaying and neutering helps dogs and cats live longer, healthier lives by eliminating the possibility of uterine, ovarian, and testicular cancer, and decreasing the incidence of prostate disease.
Rein in your pets
Always keep your dog on a leash when outside, and confine your cat indoors. Two out of every three vets, according to the Humane Society of America, recommend keeping cats indoors, because of the dangers of cars, predators, disease, and other hazards. The estimated average life span of a free-roaming cat is less than three years; an indoors-only cat gets to live an average of 15 to 18 years. If kitty needs to heed the call of the wild, an outdoor cat enclosure is a good compromise.
Swap out the junk food
Most conventional pet-food brands you find at the supermarket consist of reconstituted animal by-products, otherwise known as low-grade wastes from the beef and poultry industries. In fact, the animals used to make many pet foods are classified as Dead, Dying, Diseased, or Down (Disabled) when they line up at the slaughterhouse. If your dog or cat food doesn't say that it contains FDA-certified, food-grade meat, you should know that its contents are considered unfit for human consumption, so why would you serve it to your pet?
Natural and organic pet foods use meats that are raised in sustainable, humane ways without added drugs or hormones, minimally processed, and preserved with natural substances, such as vitamins C and E. Certified-organic pet foods must meet strict USDA standards that spell out how ingredients are produced and processed, which means no pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, artificial preservatives, artificial ingredients or genetically engineered ingredients.
Clean up their poop
Scoop up your doggie doo in biodegradable poop bags. How to pick-up dog poop.
Cat owners should avoid clumping clay litter at all costs. Not only is clay strip-mined kitty litter (bad for the planet), but the clay sediment is also permeated with carcinogenic silica dust that can coat little kitty lungs (bad for the cat). Plus, the sodium bentonite that acts as the clumping agent can poison your cat through chronic ingestion through their fastidious need to groom. Because sodium bentonite acts like expanding cement, it is also used as a grouting, sealing, and plugging material. It can swell up to 15 to 18 times their dry size and clog up your cat's insides. Eco-friendly cat litters avoid these problems.
Give them sustainable goods
Your furry friends can get in on some saving-the-planet goodness, too, and have plenty of fun with toys made from recycled materials or sustainable fibers (sans herbicides or pesticides) such as hemp. These days, you can even get pet beds made with organic cotton or even recycled PET bottles.
Use natural pet-care and cleaning products
Lather up your cats and dogs (or ferrets, rabbits, or hamsters) with natural pet-care products.
Pets, not fads
Impulse buying (say, rushing out and grabbing the next available Dalmatian puppy after watching 101 Dalmatians) isn't a good idea, as the large numbers of fad dogs that pass through shelters (often to their death) can attest. Pets are not fads or fashion accessories. Think and research before you decide to get a pet.
Melt the ice, nicely
Use a child- and pet-safe deicer such as Safe Paw's environmentally friendly Ice Melter. Rock salt and salt-based ice-melting products, which kids and animals might accidentally ingest, can cause health problems, while contaminating wells and drinking supplies.
Tag your pet
It might be a stretch to call inserting an electronic ID chip into your pet an eco-friendly move, but losing your buddy causes extreme emotional distress that turns you into nobody's friend. Ask your vet for more info.
Compost their poop
American dogs and cats create 10 million tons of waste a year, and no one knows where it's going.
Most of our pets poop either winds up in a landfill, or sits on the ground until the next rainstorm washes it into the sewer where it can drift on down to rivers and beaches. You can compost the poop, just don't use it with your vegetable garden, because the compost doesn't heat up enough to kill pathogens such as E. coli., which could contaminate your homegrown produce.
If you have room in your backyard, you can bury an old garbage bin (far away from your vegetable garden) to use as a pet-waste composter. Or check out the Doggie Dooley. The makers of the Doggy Dooley also sell an enzymatic Super Digester Concentrate for your backyard pet septic system.
Be a pet chef
If you want to know exactly what is going into your furball's food dish, or your pet suffers from allergies, you can always make your own puppy (or kitty) chow. If the idea of becoming a fulltime pet chef is just crazy talk, making the occasional meal or treat is completely doable. Those broccoli stalks left over from your last stirfry also make some tasty morsels for your pup.
Get crafty
Your cat will love you forever if you grow your own organic catnip or cat grass. Scrap yarn and fabric you might otherwise toss can also easily be transformed into pet toys with some basic crafty know-how. And they wouldn't have had to be trucked thousands of miles just to get drooled on.
Get ticks off
While you don't want to douse your pet in toxins, it is also important to keep the bugs in check. Pets can carry ticks, and ticks can carry Lyme Disease, a serious and poorly understood disease that attacks the nervous system. If you live in an area where Lyme Disease is a risk, be very cautious and seek sound advice on keeping ticks off you and your furry friends.
